


the stuff of legend

by opensummer



Category: James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Immortality, M/M, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:34:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2425547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Getting old.” They say. He’s not.</p><p>(He dies, often but not well, sleeps with lethal women and trades in secrets.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stuff of legend

**Author's Note:**

> Combination of my reaction to Skyfall, and finally getting around to seeing Highlander- the film, not the series

Bond smiles at her through the scope, sharp as a blade and twice as lethal. “Take the shot.” M says cold as ice in Eve’s ear and she does. She watches Bond as he falls and curses her failure.

She thinks that he mouths _missed_ before hitting the water.

+

He’s born in the heart of a conflict. Most of them are.

That’s not really important. He’s born in the heart of a conflict. (Sometimes if he strains himself he can even remember which one) He dies the heart of one too.

This is the important bit. He dies in the heart of a conflict, a blade through his chest and then he wakes up.

He tugs the blade out of his heart and wields it against his enemies. He dies again in a cluster of them and rises, the blade that first slew him in hand. He dies fifteen times on his first night.

He’ll carry that blade with him until blades are antiquated. Then he’ll hang it on a wall in an estate he acquired in the 1880s.

(Centuries later in a pub with another like him. He’ll say, “I died fifteen times on the first day.” The man will laugh. Says, “That must be a record.” They’ll click tankards and carry on in opposite directions the next morning. That night they’ll scare the barmaids with their tales.)

+

Patriot is a word he predates by centuries, millennia if he’s trying to remember. He rarely does.

So no he’s not doing this for queen and country. Rulers come and go, kingdoms only slightly less often then their rulers. He owes them nothing beyond a faint allegiance to the land of his birth.

The world is so much smaller then it used to be. He can travel from the Indies to Britain in hours not months and the world is shrinking still. In the years to come there won’t be shadows anymore, and he comes from the shadows.

“Rats. They will gobble each other up.” Silva says, unaware of how close he is, his kind the killers of men, killing only each other. Rats.

+

James is not his name, but it is a derivative of his name five, six languages removed. He likes the way it sounds on woman’s tongues, men’s too if he’s not being picky.

Bond he picked randomly when the recruitment officer in the Great War asked for his name.

He goes to war as a common man and rises to sergeant as the men around him die. Lucky they call him and he laughs amongst them and always volunteers to lead the charge from the trenches.

He meets the man who will become the second M, in one of these charges, dragging the man back from the land between the trenches after he took a bullet in the leg. He is the last one out and he trips over the man’s injured leg.

He pulls him out of no-mans land and takes a bullet between his shoulder blades passing just right of his heart. He staggers felled by the bullet and rises as it heals quicker then his wounds have healed before.

They close faster and faster with each injury.

He trips into the trench bringing M with him and settles with his back across the supports. His men gather round him made anxious by his fall and a rifle’s retort. He laughs it off tired and dirty, says he’s just too damn lucky to die, an edge to his voice and the man who will be M watches him with dark observant eyes.

He visits him later in the hospital to find out how much the man knows and is unsurprised when M notes that the bullet did strike him and he has not even a scar.

In that era there were no foolproof ways to track birth and deaths, names and histories. It cost less then a pound for a good forgery of a birth certificate, fifty pounds to bribe a clerk to slip a name into the records at the appropriate place. Wealth accumulates easily and he has simple needs.

He could not use that now in the age of computers, and cameras. Every step he takes leaves traces and the shadows are shrinking rapidly. People of his kind thrive in the shadows.

He tells the man his eyes must have deceived him because James is exactly as he appears, thirties and British with a northern accent. The other man doesn’t believe a word obviously and he considers killing him, fiddles with it and recognizes it would bring down trouble on himself if an intelligence agent died from wounds that are clearly not life threatening.

He leaves, putting the man out of his mind. He fights the war and his country wins, if it can be called winning. He leaves the name behind him and goes south to France. He calls himself Charles, speaks unaccented French and spends money like it will never end. France, war ravaged and crushed, accepts him unquestioningly.

It is twenty-one years before he meets M again.

+

The first time he passes through London it’s half a dozen homes, just a village. It becomes his city, after a few centuries, a fixed point in his ever expanding map of the world.

+

The man who has recently become M finds him in a bar on the eve of the next Great War, his enlistment papers tucked into his uniform jacket, flirting with a woman he’ll sleep with tonight. He smiles at him and salutes him, sloppy and cruel. He’s gained weight to match his claimed age of twenty-one, his hair cut to emphasize the nonexistent youth of his face, James Bond the II, his father’s heart having given out shortly after the War to End All Wars.

Headed into another war to end all wars, that the world has seen coming for a time now, he laughs at the predictability of humanity and flirts with pretty girls.

M pulls him away from the girl, dark haired, red lipped, lethal. He has a type.

“I could use a man like you.” He says, with no preface.

“Do I know you?” James asks, just to get a rise out of the man.

He does not react as James wishes, lifting an eyebrow and pulling the papers, James had bribed into place, from the pocket of his suit. “James Bond. If you had used a different name I would never have found you. ”

He shrugs, dropping the façade. “I like the name.”

M buys him a martini, shaken, and spins him a tale of the future, of the absence of privacy, of absolute record keeping. M sees the future in records and compilations, search engines and information as the source of all power.

In the future M paints there is no place for people like him the future. Not unless they are bound to their countries, with bonuses and mortgages. Records that say this is a man and he was born and he will die. People fear what they do not understand. He finishes and looks at James expectantly.

He takes the job for no better reason then that he is bored. M will be die eventually and he could just slip away.

He kills and fucks on command, in Germany, through the war.

+

He like cars, the feeling of going faster then any mortal has a right to and watching humans discover the feeling of indestructibility on the tight curves of a road. It amuses him.

Q, the third, hates giving him cars. They’re the fastest cars in existence and what does it matter to him that a car going that fast can’t hit a curve. He’ll walk away after the crash.

So do Q, the fourth and fifth, for that matter.

+

Post World War I, named with all the wisdom of hindsight, he ran. Post World War II they give him a program and a title, 007 and orders that put him out in the field the very next day.

He discovers that he hasn’t lived in ages, playing games with men who want to rule the world. He dies, often but not well, sleeps with lethal women and trades in secrets.

+

His coworkers start commenting on how old he’s getting. This is his third decade with MI6 and people have begun to notice that’s he’s aging. (Gracefully. Silver at his temples and lines around his eyes. His hands don’t even shake. Hair dye and closer cuts, ten pounds lost can make all the difference.)

+

Emma is her name. She’s blonde and young, pretty little girl they assign to him when the cold war is gearing up, fresh out of uni. She’s the first female field agent, painfully serious, a lousy shot.

Q doesn’t even give her a gun and it’s clear Bond must have pissed the new M off if he’s getting assigned escort missions.

Simple enough assignment, an exchange of information with an American agent. Predictably it went straight to hell. He takes four bullets to the chest and a shot to the head and they take the girl with them for interrogation, despite her clearly knowing nothing.

As they’re dragging her out he raises his head, and winks at her.

He kills them for taking her, picks them off over the course of three days until those remaining are pissing themselves at the sight of their shadows. Then he kills them too and walks out of their compound with Emma unconscious in his arms.

He buys her a novelty- a bulldog with a bobbling head that he leaves by the hospital bed, and goes back to work. They’ve instituted psychological tests which he fails spectacularly and the examiner makes a gentle recommendation to retire the old man before he makes a mistake.

Bond takes the desk job for a day before he quits. He drops the keys to his last car (blown up in the line of duty) with Q and kills a man. (They’ll call the dead man a traitor when they dig through his files and 007’s name will appear on the memorials they keep.)

He goes south and lives for a time.

The problem with living is how very dull it gets.

He eats a bullet down south and comes north again, shedding the alias he had used for twenty years like an old coat.

Emma is M, the Cold War has been over for a decade and the world is learning once again to fear the shadows. (They had forgotten for a time.)

Her husband is a good man and they eat dinner together waiting for M to return from her job. When she gets back she puts a gun to his head and he dares her to pull the trigger.

She does.

And then bitches at him about having to clean up the blood.

+

Two decades later, Q is remarking how he’s getting older before shipping him off to Turkey, another wide eyed agent in tow. (Honestly she’s not that much of a better shot then the first.)

He comes to on a beach coughing water from his lungs. In two thousand years, this is the first time that he’s drowned.

He takes his time coming home to MI6. It’s not like anything will have changed.

That’s a lie. Everything will have changed.

And nothing as well.

+

The new Q’s quickening races down his spine and he laughs and makes a joke about spots just to piss him off. Q returns the favor and he laughs.

He wonders if Q has had his first death yet. Q didn’t react to Bond as others of their kind have. (Shock first, then a bit of joy at no longer being alone, then fear. He has only met two others older then him.)

And Q is still young, young enough that computers come easily and he can laugh about being new, without a bitter edge to it.

+

In Shanghai, Eve slides the razor under his chin and pauses, the blade resting across his throat.

“You could know,” He says “for certain, if it was a headshot.”

(It was.)

She laughs and slides the blade up and away from his throat. “From any other man I would think that was a death wish.”

“And from me?”

She smiles.

+

“Resurrection.” He says the word slipping from his lips like a promise. Silva is merely a man. He has nothing to fear because he knows everything there is to know about fear.

Severine is already dead but he’ll avenge her as he has every women he’s encountered like her. He shoots the glass from her head and calls it a waste of good scotch. Silva rages and puts a bullet between her eyes.

+

Q’s first death comes from his computer, when the idiot plugs Silva’s into the MI6 mainframe. It’s a neat little death trap, something in the unlocking sparking through the keyboard and Q’s hands. It stops his heart and as deaths go it’s a neat one, near peaceful except for the alarms blaring.

He waits until Q regains his feet, for the wide eyed shock of the quickening before he runs after Silvia.

(He makes the mistake of thinking this won’t take long.)

+

There’s a moment on the phone when he’s waiting for Q to ask what happened. Instead Q tells him to get to work so he does.

He pulls the one car he never managed to destroy out of storage and it’s still the same beautiful thing. It figures in the end that he manages to destroy it too.

+

In the end he’s the last rat standing and he goes back. Q shivers at his quickening and he takes the boy out for a pint and a discussion. Their people are almost civilized these days, bar the few who hold to tradition so he warns Q and takes a mission far away.

He’s an old man these days so he dies, often but not well, sleeps with lethal women and trades in secrets.


End file.
